


Borrowed Time

by icountcards



Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, I Made Myself Cry, Season/Series 04 Spoilers, if canon won't give me answers I'll make them up myself, introspective, other characters but only briefly, some creative liberties taken
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-17
Updated: 2020-09-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:29:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26506732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icountcards/pseuds/icountcards
Summary: If Desi’s lucky, she’ll have it better than her mother, she’ll have the final say in how it happens. She’s not dumb enough to think she’ll get to decide when the debt collector comes calling for all her borrowed time, but, in a fair and just world, she’ll take a bullet, jump on a grenade, run into a fire—her death will be hers.She knows better than to count on a just world.
Relationships: Angus MacGyver/Desiree "Desi" Nguyen
Comments: 17
Kudos: 37





	Borrowed Time

**Author's Note:**

> Got to thinking about Desi's relationship with death and dying and her behavior across Season 4 and got very emotional about it.
> 
> Spoilers for basically the entirety of season 4 and parts of season 3 as well. This leans heavily on specific scenes from S4 and probably won't make sense if you're not caught up on the show. 
> 
> Come talk to me [on tumblr](http://icountcards.tumblr.com)!

On her best days, Desi likes to think she’s like her mother.

(At her worst, she’s not like anyone. There’s no one in her family tree that she can blame for the way she goes cold when things get difficult, how she doesn’t have the right words and runs instead of finding them. How she swings first and asks questions later, or not at all.) 

Maybe her mother never would’ve dreamed of kicking down doors and high-speed chases, but it’s there, the same reckless determination that has her ziplining between moving planes, she sees it in her mother leaving behind everything she’d ever known to chase a future halfway around the world for her and her brother. At her best, she’s following in her mother’s footsteps. Dedicated. Caring, even when she doesn’t have the means to express it. Building a better life for the people she loves.

Dead by 35. 

It’s only a matter of time, really, before it all goes wrong, before one of her stunts catches up to her, she’s already cheated death more than her fair share, and one of these days that scale is going to set itself to rights, and she can’t run forever.

If Desi’s lucky, she’ll have it better than her mother, she’ll have the final say in how it happens. She’s not dumb enough to think she’ll get to decide when the debt collector comes calling for all her borrowed time, but, in a fair and just world, she’ll take a bullet, jump on a grenade, run into a fire—her death will be hers. 

She knows better than to count on a just world.

It’s simple: she takes too many risks so no one else has to. And above all, she doesn’t make friends. It’s a whole lot better for everyone in the long run if there’s nobody to miss her too much when she’s gone. It’s a philosophy that served her well for almost fifteen years. 

And then Mac happened, because Jack Dalton called in that favor (and there’s another line in the logbook of the times she should’ve already died), and she was stupid enough to let herself get attached, to let him get attached, because he’s adventure and safety all wrapped together, and the way he lights up around her is enough to make her forget sometimes, the look on her father’s face at the closing of a casket. Sometimes. 

It’s almost a blessing, in a fucked-up sort of way, when it all falls apart. Better, really, to break his heart when she’s still alive for him to be angry at.

Months later, there’s a soccer pitch in Milan and a chip in her neck set to kill her and a penalty kick that she doesn’t botch like she’s supposed to, and for a horrible moment she’s sure her time’s up for real, and she can’t help but wonder if it’s enough to matter, if inconveniencing Codex is worth it or if she’s about to die for _nothing_ —

Until Mac flies onto the field, an honest-to-God guardian angel, and she adds another tally to the times she should’ve died, instead. 

And then he kisses her, like he hasn’t learned a thing, like he can’t see that it’s just a matter of time before all the times she’s almost died catch up to her and it isn’t almost anymore. And every stupid feeling that she’d folded up and buried under a hundred and one layers of denial and petty spite and _it’s better this way, really it is_ , bursts open like a firecracker in her chest and she kisses back, pulls him closer, because against every ounce of better judgment she has—which is, admittedly, not much—she’s _missed_ this, missed him, and a selfish part of her thinks it might be worth the inevitable hurt it’ll cause, just to have him again, if only for a short time. 

The other side of her bed feels especially empty that night. 

She’s exhausted, jet-lagged and wrung out from the adrenaline crash after almost dying, but she tosses and turns, goes around and around wondering if there’s any way this could possibly end well until she falls into a restless sleep and dreams of flames and twisted metal. She’s no closer to an answer the next morning.

She needs an expert.

*** 

“Sorry it’s been so long,” she tells the polished granite as she brushes the leaves away. “I would’ve brought flowers, but they don’t sell the kind you like anymore.” Not since Mrs. Vang retired and sold her flower shop to someone who turned it into a café. She’s looked elsewhere. Nothing is quite right.

(It’s a nice café, really. But she can’t exactly bring a cup of coffee to the cemetery.) 

“Wish you were here,” she says as she settles to sit cross-legged in the grass. “You’d know what I should do.” 

She can just hear it, her mom’s judgment on every single boy and most of the girls she’d known in high school: _you’re too good for them, baby girl._

“Not this time.” She smiles shakily. “If anything, he’s too good for me.” He’s just blind to it, hasn’t realized yet that he’s the sun and she’s a shooting star at best. She twists a blade of grass between her fingers. “Thought I scared him away once, but it didn’t stick.” Because for all his genius, he’s too dumb to see that he’s just going to lose her, one way or another. 

Because love inevitably looks like an empty apartment, too much space for just her and her dad, her brother away at college and her mother not there anymore to fill the rooms with too many houseplants crammed under every window and a song for every occasion and the same daytime soap operas on tape that she’d watched over and over again to practice her English, the deafening silence as Desi buried herself in homework and they didn’t talk about it.

There had been a lot of soup, that first year. 

The image of Mac in an empty house, alone with all the fleeting ghosts of herself she’ll leave behind, hurts too much to think about. 

But love also looks like her father, for all his groaning every time her mother came home with another plant, faithfully watering each and every one of them and rearranging them every so often so they all get their fair share of sunlight. It’s Desi, alone in a shitty apartment on a Friday night, looking up clips online of old soap operas that she still knows by heart and letting them play in the background as she struggles her way through trigonometry. 

It’s her mother’s lullaby, a hundred feet in the air on a transmission tower, and in hindsight, she thinks, that’s probably about the moment when all her well-laid plans to do her job and not get attached started to fall apart. 

There’s a storm rolling in on the horizon, but she sits in the grass until the first raindrops reach her, makes the drive back to Los Angeles in the pouring rain, and as she checks on the spider plant in her kitchen, her apartment feels just the slightest bit less empty and cold.

*** 

In the end, she does the only thing she can do: she tries not to think too much about it. Pretends, in between breaking up smuggling rings and hiding in swamps, that everything is normal, which lasts all of half an hour before a nice evening turns into getting wrongfully arrested and sneaking through windows and saving Riley and her boyfriend from a Japanese crime lord, and normal goes up in the flames of an improvised flamethrower. 

Maybe Mac’s right, and normal isn’t the mark they should be shooting for at all, she reflects as she lies in bed and stares up at the ceiling.

They fall back into a familiar pattern, for better or worse, and their not-normal normal feels more right against the backdrop of the Phoenix and covert ops than trying to live as civilians, and she still doesn’t think too hard about it. 

It’s safer, she thinks, to not confront the unease in the pit of her stomach at Mac going to confront Mason without her to watch his back, with Oversight, quite frankly, in no condition to be in the field. And when their comms cut out with no backup anywhere near them, all she can think is that this isn’t how the story’s supposed to go, she’s supposed to be there, and by the time they find Mac he’s alone, watching Codex’s compound burn, and she knows the answer to her question before she asks it. Doesn’t need the answer that sticks in his throat as she follows his stare toward the flames.

*** 

It feels wrong, somehow, too personal, helping Mac clean out his dad’s apartment, packing his life into boxes in neat stacks. She hadn’t known him, not really; he was her boss, and then he was just a shadow on Mac’s conscience, and she’d watched it weigh on him and not known what to do. She still doesn’t. She’s not really sure she’s much help, anyway, packing up dishes to give away because the kitchen seems to be the only place she can be sure of not encountering sentimental things she has no idea what to do with. 

She sets another box on the table and glances at the clock. It’s later than she’d realized, almost seven. “Mac?” she calls out, and, when he doesn’t answer, goes looking. 

He’s standing in his dad’s office, staring absently at something in his hands, and he doesn’t even seem to notice her in the doorway. “It’s getting late,” she says softly. “Do you want to get something to eat?” 

He turns to face her, but he’s still not looking at her, not really, flipping what she can now see is a neon orange fishing lure between his fingers. “He really wasn’t a very good dad, was he?” he says after a long moment, and there’s so much unsaid underneath the question that she can see on his face, and she hates it, hates that she doesn’t have the right words, that there probably aren’t any right words, that she can’t somehow be less useless than packing up the dishes of a man she barely knew. 

“You’re still allowed to miss him, you know,” she says, and it feels flimsy somehow, not quite what she means. “Come on,” she says gently when he doesn’t respond. “It’ll still be here in the morning.” 

He shakes off a nonexistent chill and nods. “You’re right, I’m starving,” he says, like he’s startled to realize it, and tucks the lure into his pocket as he brushes past her in the doorway. 

She gets out of the shower later that evening to find Mac fiddling with something at the kitchen table, tiny metal parts scattered around him and a leather watch band lying abandoned on a chair. She’s not even sure where the watch came from. It’s definitely not one she’s ever seen him wear. “Mac?” she says, eyeing the scatter of gears and hardware. “What are you doing?” 

He barely glances up at her, laser-focused on whatever contraption he’s fiddling with. “I’m just—” He makes a frustrated noise as something goes skittering across the table and onto the floor. “I’m almost done.” 

“That’s not an answer,” she says, bending to pick up the piece that’s escaped him and handing it back to him. He has the fishing lure he’d been looking at earlier, only now it has pieces of the watch mechanism attached to it. She tilts her head to get a closer look. “What does it do?”

“If I’ve got it right, it’ll…” he trails off and stands, turning to drop his creation into a bowl of water on the counter. It clicks and spirals around the bowl once, twice, before dropping to the bottom and twitching ineffectually. He sighs. “Not that.” 

She watches as he pulls it out of the water and catches his wrist before he can go back to messing with it. “It’ll still be here tomorrow,” she says gently. “Come to bed?” 

For a second he looks like he might argue, but then he sets the lure down on the counter and nods. “No one’s life depends on this,” he says, and she’s pretty sure he’s actually rolling his eyes at himself for it. 

“That’s—” she breaks off. Doesn’t know what to say. _That’s okay, it doesn’t have to,_ hangs hollowly behind her lips. It’s not like he needs her permission to make himself an automated goldfish or whatever it is he’s going for here. “You two went fishing once last year, right?” she says instead. 

He glances down at the lure and clears his throat. “Uh, yeah,” he says. “Didn’t catch a single fish, but I’m told that’s the authentic experience.” His mouth twitches into a halfhearted smile. 

“I wouldn’t know,” she says. She can still remember Mac’s conversation with his dad outside the black site, stilted and awkward, and even then, when she’d barely known Mac, she’d watched Mac get shot down for whatever science tangent he’d been about to go on and winced. She glances over at the lure again. “Did you want to keep working on that?” 

He looks torn for a moment, glancing between her and the bits and pieces on the table, and then shakes his head. “It can wait. Not the first time I’ve taken apart Dad’s things and not set them to rights,” he says, and oh, that would explain where the watch came from. 

He brushes past her, and she follows him to the bedroom, curls up next to him as he tosses and turns, until he finally settles into a restless sleep, punctuated by mutterings too quiet to understand but too loud for her to sleep through, twitching away without waking when she reaches out.

She doesn’t get very much sleep that night.

*** 

It all starts to blur, as they throw everything into stopping Codex, and Mac folds in on himself and doesn’t talk about what’s haunting him, and it gnaws at her stomach to see him hurt and not have the words. And they capture the Merchant, and it’s a mistake to put Mac in that cell, she knows it is, but he won’t be talked out of it, and the horrible feeling in her stomach just grows as she listens to Mac echo Codex’s ideals to the Merchant.

She catches Matty side-eyeing her as she tries to focus on the screen, and she ducks her head and slips out of the room into the stairwell, leans against the wall and presses her palms against her eyelids. She’s so _tired_ of it, of everyone at the Phoenix giving her those looks like they understand, because they don’t, none of them, not even Riley and Bozer and Matty and Russ. They can only see the weight of the same worry they all carry for Mac, as he burns himself up chasing shadows, as she’s haunted by the specter of him doing it all over again, alone.

Russ is the one to retrieve her from the stairwell, and he knows better than to say anything, at least, doesn’t have time to anyway because it all goes sideways after that, and she hates, hates, hates being right about this op being a bad idea. Can’t help the way the worry boiling up in her stomach spills over into accusations that she regrets as soon as they spill out of her mouth. That she doesn’t believe, not really, but she needs to put a voice to them, needs Mac to see that Codex has gotten into his head and scrambled it. 

She expects him to get defensive, to snap back at her, insist again that he’s fine when she can see that he isn’t. She’s prepared for that, has a parry on the tip of her tongue before he even speaks. 

She isn’t ready for him to blurt out that he loves her. Like that isn’t the worst, most foolish thing he could do. Like he hasn’t lost too much already. Like he doesn’t know he’s setting himself up for pain. Like there’s any way this could end other than disaster. The words evaporate in her mouth. 

Telling him not to love her is, admittedly, probably not the best way for her to react to this revelation. 

That’s—it’s too much for her to face, even now, as they crash together like it’s the only thing they know how to do. Maybe it is. 

And then, just as suddenly, it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t stop him from orchestrating a jailbreak, stealing a superweapon, and throwing his lot in with the doomsday crew. Maybe, she thinks, it would have hurt less if he’d been lying. But she’d seen the truth on his face. He loved her, and it wasn’t enough.

It burns in her chest long after she’s been cleared by Medical after having the oxygen forced from her lungs. _No permanent effects._ Tell that to her heart.

She’s still simmering with barely-contained rage the next time she sees him, and the knowledge that this is all a con does nothing to settle it. It burns differently, but just as hot, that he hadn’t trusted her enough to leave her a warning, a sign, a cryptic note, a paperclip sculpture, _anything_ to clue her in. 

There’s barely time for anger after that, certainly no time to settle into it, there’s a bomb to defuse to stop the apocalypse and things are momentarily much larger than a personal grudge, no matter how justified. And then for a terrifying moment, the dust and smoke billows, with no sign of Mac. And her heart drops through the concrete, because what if this is it, what if he’s really gone and she never told him she loves him, and—and he steps out of the smoke, limping but very much alive, an honest-to-God phoenix in his own right, and she barely makes it to catch him as they collapse against each other. 

Maybe, after everything, she’s stupid to think there’s still anything left for the two of them. She doesn’t trust him again yet, not really. But she loves him, an unfamiliar admission she turns over and over in her head, and a small voice that sounds suspiciously like her mother keeps telling her to give it one more chance. 

Speaking of, if they are going to make another go of it, there’s someone that he really should meet.

*** 

“Hey, Mom,” she says as she kneels in the grass. “This is Mac.” 

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Nguyen,” he says, and she glances up to see him shifting from foot to foot, hands in his pockets, in a very familiar, awkward, meeting-the-parents pose. It’s somewhere between adorable and absurd, and her chest tightens at the sight.

She swallows hard and shoves down the lump in her throat. “You’d like him, I think,” she manages, voice still a little uneven. “He’s good for me. Makes me want to be a better person.” Him and his stubborn determination to see the good in people, in the world, it’s enough to make her start to believe in it too, shed her bitterness and anger piece by piece like body armor. Enough to make her think maybe she’s not in a war zone anymore. 

He crouches next to her. “Wouldn’t exactly say I’ve done a great job in that department recently.” 

She rolls her eyes. “Don’t listen to him,” she says. “He’s saved the world at least three times already this week.” And they’re talking again, about things that matter, sometimes, and sometimes he spends half an hour arguing about pizza toppings just to rile her up enough to get her to kiss him to shut him up, and sometimes she feels so _much_ that she wants to get up and run and not look back until she’s worn through the soles of her shoes. But she’s working on it. 

“When I was fourteen, I got into a fight at school,” Desi says, glancing over at Mac. He tilts his head expectantly. “I got pulled out of class for the rest of the day and she had to leave work to come pick me up. Thought she was going to kill me.” 

“I’m glad she didn’t,” Mac says. 

Desi laughs softly. “She was a little more sympathetic once she knew I was picking fights on my brother’s behalf. I wasn’t about to let him get pushed around,” she says. “I still got quite the lecture to stop getting into fights.” 

Mac raises his eyebrows. “Did you stop?” he asks like he already knows the answer.

“I stopped getting caught.” She grins. “She told me if I kept thinking with my heart instead of my head I was going to get myself into trouble I couldn’t get out of. I don’t think she meant for me to get better at getting out of trouble.” 

“I think asking you not to get in trouble might’ve been a hopeless cause,” Mac says.

“I might’ve listened a little better if I’d known I didn’t have much longer to listen,” she says as she stands and brushes the dirt off her jeans. “She died about a year after that. Car accident.” She stares at the ground, not trusting herself to form words if she actually meets his eyes. “I refused to get my permit for almost a year.” 

He leans into her, presses their shoulders together, grounding without being overwhelming. “I’m so sorry.”

She’s silent for a long moment, reading and rereading the inscription on the stone, in English and Vietnamese, before turning to face him. “I’m going to be just like her, you know,” she says eventually. 

His brow furrows the tiniest bit. “She sounds like an admirable woman.” 

“That’s,” she pauses to swallow around the lump in her throat, “not what I meant.” She glances back at the headstone. 

He opens his mouth, then abruptly snaps it shut as he seems to catch her meaning. “You’re pretty good at not dying, in my experience.”

“I should’ve died at least a dozen times by now,” she says, voice shaking despite her best efforts. “Just a matter of time. I’ve borrowed a lot already.”

He’s quiet for a long moment. “You remember how I said you could have half of my luck?” he says eventually.

She huffs. “I don’t think I can count on luck forever.”

“The way I figure,” he says, fidgeting with the cuff of his shirt, “the universe owes me for everything it’s taken away.” It’s astounding, she thinks, how matter-of-fact he sounds, no bitterness behind the words even though he’d have every right to it. “So, if you’re running on borrowed time, you can borrow some of mine.” He reaches out, tilts her head up with a hand under her chin to meet her eyes. “I don’t want it if you’re not around for it.” 

Whatever she’d been about to say dies in her throat. “That’s…” she starts and trails off, tears welling in her eyes. “I don’t think—” she doesn’t know what the rest of that sentence is, doesn’t know what she thinks, doesn’t know how to handle that kind of revelation, that he’s ready to write off the world without her in it. Wants to tell him he’s an idiot for it. But he’s _her_ idiot, and he’s everything she never knew she wanted, even when he’s waking her up at six in the goddamned morning because he just can’t wait to show her the mechanized fish he’s finally got working, swimming little figure-eights in its bowl. “You can’t just make promises like that,” she chokes out.

He tilts his head. “Because you don’t think I’m serious?”

“Because I know you are,” she manages, and then the tears that she’s kept such a careful handle on spill, and she folds herself into his shoulder and cries, loud and ugly, because it’s too much, to be chosen above the world, and it’s a thought she doesn’t know how to think, to imagine a life with him that doesn’t come to a knife-edge end.

He wraps his arms around her, holds her steady as she sobs, pulls her close until she can hear his heartbeat in his chest, sure and steady, anchoring her as her entire world falls apart and reassembles around her. 

Even as she runs out of tears, she keeps her face pressed into his shirt, takes a breath that’s less shaky than the last. “I love you, you know,” she says softly.

He pulls her impossibly closer, like he’s afraid she’ll float away on the breeze if he lets go. “I do now.”


End file.
